How to Use Pinterest

If you haven’t yet learned how to use Pinterest then now is the time for your brand to make a profile. Pinterest is a great site for promoting your brand’s essence and style and its really great if you target your products to females, as they account for 70% of the 3.3 million users. Pinterest is like an online bulletin board where users can pinup things like their wish list, recipes, and things that they need to buy. This social site is a great way to promote your brand through personal recommendations, one of the most effective ways to sell products.

There’s definitely a way to go about this as Pinterest has clearly stated that the purpose of their webpage is for social sharing not self-promotion for businesses.

How to Use Pinterest | Show Your Essence

Mashable explains how businesses are supposed to use Pinterest to promote a lifestyle, choose good content, and provide solid information on a particular niche. Thats how to use Pinterest:

Pinterest calls for a more holistic approach to marketing, and it can be more effective and engaging than traditional advertising because the consumers can really see how your brand fits into their lives. For example,Bon Appetit can’t just pin pictures from the website or magazine, but it can pin images of cooking appliances, beautiful kitchen decor, cutlery, dinner parties and delicious creations or recipes — basically anything related to cooking and food. Seeing these culinary items will continually drive home the Bon Appetit brand, thus making pinners more familiar with and more likely to trust the brand, visit the website and maybe even subscribe to the magazine.

You see the key to learning how to use Pinterest is to create boards. Boards are designed for posting pictures based around a certain niche or category. Check out some of our favorite examples of boards to find out how to use Pinterest.

Rent the Runway: The fashion-rental site groups its boards into occasions — bachelorette party, fall wedding, dance party, New Year’s Eve — and each board contains various “looks” for that particular event to help you get inspired and achieve an appropriate look.

Birchbox: The beauty subscription service pins close-ups of made-up hair, eyes, lips and painted nails to show various looks that can be created with makeup. There’s also a board devoted to food, since a girl has to eat.

Customers can choose which boards to subscribe to, so try and create boards that fit different lifestyles so that you can attract many different personality user types.

How to Use Pinterest | Use it as a Focus Group

People use their Pinterest accounts as a form of self expression, so if someone is following your brand or posting pinups from your bulletin boards then you should probably take a look at their pages as well. These are your customers and the key in learning how to use Pinterest is to discover the true interests and lifestyles of your customers. It really gives you a great insiders perspective on consumer’s lives and can lead your company to new product innovations.

How to Use Pinterest | Crowdsourcing

Mashable describes how crowdsourcing is one of the great perks of knowing how to use Pinterest:

You can ask fans to pin pictures of themselves with their favorite product of yours and tag you, and then you can easily repin those photos onto a VIP board — it’ll give a shoutout to these fans and show potential customers that your current users really like using your product. If your company hosted an even recently, encourage people to pin and tag the photos as a sort of crowdsourced scrapbook. And around the holidays, encourage them to pin a “wish list” board to curate the gifts they’re hoping for.

Pinterest is yet another great free social media tool that you can use to promote your brand, but just don’t come off too salesy when trying your luck at how to use Pinterest.